Thomas K Landauer

Tom Landauer received his degree at Harvard University in 1960 and held positions at Harvard University, Dartmouth College, Stanford University, Princeton University, and University of Colorado. He also served as Executive Vice President of Research of Pearson Knowledge Technologies (PKT, formerly Knowledge Analysis Technologies), of which he was founding President in 1998. Tom was a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a Fellow in their Institute of Cognitive Science. Tom was a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories and its successors for 25 years. Tom and the group of computer scientists, linguists and cognitive psychologists he directed at Bell Labs, Bellcore, and then Telcordia conducted the fundamental and applied work that led to the theory, development and implementation of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). His company at PKT is applying LSA to automatic analysis of essays, cross-language information retrieval, and collaborative learning. His Intelligent Essay Assessor can grade many types of essays as accurately as human expert graders. He is first editor of the 2007 Handbook of Latent Semantic Analysis published by Lawrence Erlbaum. Tom has contributed to our understanding of broad issues and implications of human-computer interaction with many papers. He founded a company to turn research in language into educational technology products. That company (Knowledge Analysis Technologies) was purchased by Pearson plc in 2004 and continues to thrive. Tom worked as chief scientist until 2013. His wife, Lynn was president of the company until 2013. Tom is survived by his three daughters and their spouses, Katherine and John Vernacchia (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), Deborah Landauer (Burlington, Vermont, former spouse. Thomas Kafka), and Elizabeth Landauer of Brooklyn, New York. Tom and his first wife, Cynthia Almy Josephs (now deceased) had three grandchildren, Alexander Landauer, Orion Kafka, and Matthew Vernacchia. Tom is survived by his sister-in-law, Beth Mooney (Cleveland, Ohio), and his wife, Lynn Streeter of Boulder, Colorado.